Sermon
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Stewardship III-Every blessing is from
God
In
my hands I hold two items. What are
they? (A red cloth and a pen)
Where
did I get the red cloth? (someone made it for me)
Where
did I get the pen? (I bought it)
Anyone
have a $20 bill? (After one is produced, ask the following to the person who
gives it). Where did you get this $20
bill (probably will say I earned it)
Is
this red cloth a holy thing? How about
the pen? How about the $20 bill?
Someone
made the red cloth for me, but before they made it, they bought the fabric, and
before they could buy the fabric, the fabric was sewn from cotton taken from a
field. The first cotton and the first
field were created by God. So the red
cloth came from God, by way of the person who gave it to me.
The
pen was bought from a store, and before it was in the store, it was in a
factory being made into a pen, and before it was a pen, it was natural elements
of carbon, metal, and petroleum, elements made by God. So the pen came from God also.
The
$20 was earned from a job. Someone
worked hard and got paid, and that’s how they got the money. But how does one get a job? One has a talent that he or she develops
which comes from a brain which comes from God.
So the $20 bill came from God also.
So you can’t really say, “I earned it,” but rather God blessed me in
allowing me to use a talent He gave me in order to earn some money.
I
could give example after example, but you get the point, everything that we
have comes from God. As we pray in the
liturgy, “Every good gift comes from above, coming down from You the Father of
Lights.”
Now
to the question of holiness. Is the red
cloth a holy thing? I guess that depends
what you use it for. A red cloth is used
in bullfighting to rile up an animal.
That is not a holy thing. But the
same red cloth can be used to help distribute Holy Communion, and then it is a
holy thing. It can also be used to make
some clothes or a blanket to keep warm, also a worthwhile use.
The
pen can be used to write a nasty letter.
It can also be used to write a sermon, or a Christmas card, or a
get-well note or a letter of encouragement.
So the pen can be used for something holy as well.
And
as for the $20 bill, you can go and gamble with it, or buy drugs with it and that
would not be good use of the $20 bill.
Or you can buy food and necessities with it. Or you can give it to the church or to the
poor and then it becomes a holy thing.
When
we offer the Divine Liturgy, and we offer Holy Communion on the altar, someone
offers the bread. Today, some of the
ladies of our parish contributed the bread that was offered in the
service. However, the flour, water, salt
and yeast, the ingredients used in the making of the bread, were once parts of
the created world, placed there by God, so the bread may have come from the
hands of a couple of people in our parish, but it’s origins are from the hands
of God. Someone donated the wine for the
Communion, which was created by people, who harvested grapes, planted from
seeds that came from original seeds created by God. So when we kneel down to offer the bread and
wine on the Altar Table, asking for God to change them into the Body and Blood
of Christ, we say “We offer to You these gifts, from Your own gifts.” We do not say, “We offer to You these gifts
from OUR own gifts,” because we realize that the source of these gifts is their
creator, God.
Now
each of us has been blessed with talents.
And these talents are not our talents, but talents we have received from
God, His gift to us. So when we offer a
talent to God, we are really offering back to Him something He has already
given to us. Same with our things—When
we use our things for holy purposes, we are giving to God something that was
His before it was ours. And when we
offer money to support the church, we are not giving up, as much as we are
giving back, something we first received from Him, money, derived from work,
derived from talents, derived from God.
Stewardship
is how well we take care of what has been entrusted to us from God. So if God blesses you with a child, that is a
miracle, that is a gift, that is a sacred trust. A child is a sacred thing that a parent holds
in trust—the child is not yours, it is God’s child. It is not your child forever, because you
will not be here forever, and sometimes the parent outlives the child, God
allows one to be a caretaker of a child for only a short amount of time. So the child is held in trust, as parents we
are stewards, temporary caretakers of our children. Same thing with our homes, our marriages, our
jobs, our talents, our pens, our pieces of red cloth, our money, our planet,
and most especially our church. We are
temporary caretakers of our church—we have to take care of it as BEST as we
can, because one day we will turn it over to someone else.
I
firmly believe that our entrance into God’s Kingdom is going to be based in
large part on our stewardship—how we have handled the things God has given to
us. Did we use our gifts for His glory,
or only for our gain? Did we see the
things we had as gifts or as entitlements?
Did we use our gains for only ourselves or did we give back a portion to
God for the work of His church? And was
our gift a sacrificial one, or a token?
I
don’t know if I am a good priest or if I’m not.
I guess God will reckon with me on the day I stand before Him and answer
for what I’ve done or what I’ve failed to do.
I’m trying to do my best as the priest of this community. For some, that will never be good
enough. I’m trying to make decisions
that will be the best for this community, to help it to grow, to help it to
bring the Gospel of Christ to each member, and to identify new members to bring
into the fold.
I
don’t know if I am a good husband or a good father. I guess God will reckon with me on the day I
stand before Him and answer for what I’ve done or what I’ve failed to do. Is it right that I live in
Today
is stewardship Sunday—it is the day I ask you to turn in your stewardship form
for 2009. Many of you have sent them in
already. I don’t have a total figure
right now because we received many of them in the last week and we didn’t total
them. There are extra stewardship forms
up here in the front of the church, extra envelopes, even extra pens. If there are 300 people church this morning,
representing at least 150 families, then by this afternoon, we should have at
least 150 pledge forms turned in. If you
did not turn in your pledge form yet, I am asking that you please taken one,
fill it out and return it in this basket.
I will be at church all afternoon today, so you can take the form, fill
it out and bring it back in half an hour or an hour and the church will still
be open.
The
economic times are tough ones. Lots of
churches are suffering. Lots of people
are suffering. However there is one kind
of church that is not suffering, and one kind of person who is not
suffering—the kind of church that knows how to give, the kind of person who
knows how to give. Remember the story of
the five loaves and two fish, how five loaves fed 5,000 people and still there
were 12 baskets left over. This is an
example of how God blesses and multiplies what we have when we offer it to Him
with joy and without reservation. Think
of your time—let’s say you have a whole day free and you say, “I’m going to get
a lot of stuff done.” And then you start
to fritter the time away, watch TV, surf the Internet, play video games—the day
goes by quickly and you get nothing done.
Then think about the day that you seem to have a lot on your plate, more
than you think you can handle—you pray, you try to work efficiently, and all of
a sudden, you get more done than you could ever have imagined. Stewardship is kind of the same thing—when we
don’t watch what we spend and we spend frivolously, there never seems to be
enough money. When we watch what we
spend and offer a portion of what we spend to God with sacrifice and joy, then
we find there is always something extra left at the end of the day.
I’m
going to leave you with one more term that I will introduce to you today, that
I will develop more fully later on. It
is the Greek word “Sinithesis,” which means “consciousness.” When combined with the word “Ieratiki” with “Sinithesis,’
“ieratiki sinithesis” means the “priestly consciousness,” developing the
conscience of the priest. Is he a man of
prayer, or merely a showman? Is he a man
of loving concern, or a good actor?
These are questions I must ponder, the development of a priestly
consciousness, Ieratiki sinithesis, is something I must answer for. But there is a Christianoi sinithesis, the
Christian consciousness, and it is incumbent upon each of you to be developing
this—are your striving to become people of prayer, are you seeking to help your
fellow man, are you supporting God’s church by encouraging others, by offering
back to God His gifts, that He has graciously made yours? These are questions you must ponder, these
are things you will answer for. The idea
of consciousness is disappearing in our world, as we become more and more
accepting of any kind of behavior under the sun. And yet as we as a society see our things as
entitlements, rather than gifts, as we become more materialistically dependent
and less spiritually connected, the truth of the matter is, God is going to
judge us based on faith and our stewardship of His gifts to us, not on our
sense of independence or accomplishment.
More on sinithesis, consciousness to follow.
For
today, please turn in your stewardship form.
Please prayerfully consider, what portion of God’s gifts to you that you
can offer back to Him this year. It
would be very easy to judge and say, “Hey so and so, you can afford more,” but
that wouldn’t be right. There are a lot
of people who can do a lot more, but stewardship is a matter of conscience, it
is a matter of your sinithesis. And your
stewardship, good or bad, is something that will be judged on not by me, but by
God. I would not want to answer God if
he asked me, “Hey, why did it take you until September each year to get your
form in?” Or “why did you withhold your
pledge for a year?” Or “why could you
afford so and so thing but you made the pledge to the church nominal?” These are things for you to consider
privately, which God will sort out one day.
As for today, please turn in your stewardship form. Offer to God a portion of what He has already
offered to you.
Two
other quick things: It came to me by way
of the proverbial grape vine that someone was offended by the thank you letter
I wrote in the Messenger you received this week. Someone and maybe many some-ones think I was
either too thankful or not thankful enough.
It is nice to offer thanks and it is nice to be thanked. I try to thank
people as much as I can. But being thanked should never be the motivation to do
something—our motive should be for the glory of God. One of my favorite phrases is “pay it
forward.” I like doing things for
people, and when I do something for someone and they say, “What can I do to
thank you,” I love to answer, “Don’t thank me, do it for someone else, pay it
forward.”
Secondly,
many of you have met Fr. John, who started serving in our church last
month. Fr. John is a kind man, a brother
priest, and potentially a real asset to our community. Wouldn’t it be great if he could join us not
only on Sundays but work here during the week as well, to assist me in the many
ministries of this parish? Your
stewardship can make that possible.
Another priest would mean more opportunities to grow our community and
to minister more thoroughly to those who are already part of it. Just something to think about.
When
you use a talent for the glory of God, it becomes a holy thing. When you see a possession as a gift from God,
then that becomes a holy thing. When you
offer money to the church that becomes a holy thing. And when your life becomes about stewardship,
about taking what you have and offering it back to God, then your life becomes
a holy life, and you are well on your way to eternal holiness with God in His
heavenly kingdom. As we pray, “Every
good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from You the Father of Lights,
and to YOU we give glory, thanksgiving and worship, to the Father and to the
Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.